3 October 2007 | Theory
In the summer 2007 issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Larry Shiner and Yulia Kriskovets have contributed an article “The Aesthetics of Smelly Art”: The remarkable increase in the number of artworks that foreground scents and odors during recent years suggests the need for an assessment of the aesthetic and artistic possibilities [...]
11 May 2007 | Journals, Theory
“C’est un fait que l’histoire de la peinture en Occident s’est largement construite en rapport avec la littérature.” This statement appears on the back of the most recent issue of Europe (n.933-934), which is devoted to “Littérature & peinture.” Edited by Daniel Bergez, it includes contributions from Yves Bonnefoy, Gao Xingjian, and many others. In [...]
In the March-April 2007 Acta Fabula, Marianna Marino reviews the essay collection Puissances de l’image: “As its title indicates, Puissances de l’image considers the multiple forms that iconic power can take. It prefers puissance to pouvoir, puissance being tied more closely to notions of virtuality and possibility. (It collects studies presented at the 2nd International [...]
11 April 2007 | Contemporary, Theory
Caroline A. Jones reviews David Joselit’s new book Feedback: Television Against Democracy in Artforum: “The field of art history registered a seismic shift in the late 1990s, when crops of grad students began to designate ‘video art’ as a topic for their oral exams, or even to write their dissertations on the formerly bereft genre.” [...]
10 April 2007 | Theory
Art Bulletin continues its series of “interventions.” In the March 2007 issue, Michael Ann Holly opens a discussion on the melancholy aspects of our discipline: “The experience of visual captivation (when the two become one) is transitory, even ephemeral, however powerful its aftereffects. In ‘workaday consciousness,’ its consolation lingers, and like ruins contemplated across many [...]
6 April 2007 | Theory
At the recent College Art Association conference, several speakers referenced the work of the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s new book The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (“the first comprehensive reinterpretation of Courbet in a generation” according to its flap copy), she opens with [...]
2 April 2007 | Ancient, Theory
The March 2007 World Archaeology is devoted to ‘viewing space.’ In the preface, Mark Lake writes that archaeologists’ studies of this topic over the last 15 years “have been dominated by landscape studies, particularly the placement of monuments.” They have either focused on the phenomenology of “embodied experience” or “made substantial use of the visibility [...]
28 March 2007 | Ancient, Theory
In the January-March issue of Word & Image, Mary Stieber writes: “… throughout Classical antiquity, writers, poets, and thinkers were in the habit of looking to the visual arts to find ways to present and clarify various ethical and philosophical questions that modern life posed and modern literature dramatized … There is a degree of [...]
22 March 2007 | Contemporary, Theory
The Winter 2007 Representations features an article by Katalin Orbán on “Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers“: “[these are] parallel books, devoted to historical crisis as family history — the former to the Holocaust, the latter to the attack on the World Trade Center — both narrated through [...]
In the Fall/Winter 2006 Woman’s Art Journal, Ute L. Tellini reviews Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, which was edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard: “The problem, the editors state in the introduction to their latest volume, is that postmodernism, grounded in the masculinist principles of Freud, Lacan, and Saussure, benefited [...]
9 March 2007 | Conferences, Theory
This July, the week-long Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will consider “Globalism in Art”: “Faculty include Harry Harootunian, Fredric Jameson, Susan Buck-Morss, James Elkins, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, and Shigemi Inaga. Lectures and discussions are open to the public (tickets required). The seminars are limited to 15 Fellows; [...]
8 March 2007 | Ancient, Books, Modern, Theory
Numerous engaging book reviews can be found in the November 2006 issue of Art History (reviews editor Liz James). On John Henderson’s The Triumph of Art at Thorvaldsens Museum: ‘Løve’ in Copenhagen, writes: “Which of us, nowadays, would dare to declare our love for a monument as the motive for a scholarly study? John Henderson [...]
28 February 2007 | Books, Journals, Theory
In the Autumn 2006 issue of Critique d’Art, Bruno-Nassim Aboudrar rejoices that “at least three recent books attest to the new awareness on the part of art history of the theoretical challenges of its object or — which comes to more or less the same thing — attest to a reconciliation-in-progress between art history and [...]
26 February 2007 | Journals, Photography, Theory
In language that recalls the recent CAA panel devoted to the definition of architecture, the Spring 2007 issue of History of Photography devoted to “hybridity” argues in its introduction that “our postmodern age has transformed hybridity (both the process and the result) into one of its master codes, and perhaps even into one of its [...]
17 February 2007 | Architecture, Conferences, News, Theory
The line at Starbucks seemed longer than ever this morning, but apparently it did not include very many lovers of architecture dragging and drugging themselves out of bed this Saturday morning to make it to this session, “Detecting Architecture: Questions of Evidence in Architectural History.” There are twenty attendees here at best. Or perhaps it’s [...]
15 February 2007 | Conferences, News, Theory
This morning, the Physical insistently re-asserts itself at the highly cerebral panel “The Status of Interpretation in Art History.” Two bodies cannot occupy the same space, and therefore this panel was hastily relocated to Gramercy Suite when it became apparent that its original ballroom had been double-booked. The new Suite holds the 100-odd attendees comfortably, [...]
17 October 2006 | Books, Theory
In CAA Reviews, Jill H. Casid reviews The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, edited by Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski: “Sensitive to charges that visual culture studies is an amorphous and ever-expanding field without either a clearly defined object of study or rigorous research and analytical methods, the first section of the reader on [...]
19 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the September 2006 Art Bulletin, Robert Williams and Christopher S. Wood contribute a mock Platonic dialogue. They write in their introduction, “Its value as a point of departure — as a tool with which to anatomize the challenges now confronting us — rests on the figure of Protagoras, who, as a Sophist, can be [...]
18 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the Summer 2006 October, comparative literature scholar Daniel Heller-Roazen discusses “the concept of the perception of the fact of perception, the ‘sense,’ as Aristotle wrote in the De Anima, ‘that I am seeing and hearing.’” Poetic, difficult to summarize, his article concludes: “Sensation, in this way, outlasts its own activity. At the limit, there [...]
18 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the summer 2006 Representations, English professor Mark Canuel writes: “It would be both right and wrong to say that aesthetics has returned as a subject of urgent scholarly inquiry within the past five years … Renewed commitments to defining and defending aesthetic pleasure center mainly on … a certain restricted type of pleasure — [...]
